1. Field of Invention
This invention is referred to vehicles, particularly to the systems for transporting, evacuating and rescuing people, mainly from high-rise buildings, and can be used during construction, fire-fighting and maintenance of high buildings. The invention applies to the system that is to ascend and descend personnel, cargoes and technical hardware required for maintenance on high-rise buildings.
2. Description of the Related Art
Nowadays in high-rise buildings, any upright transportation becomes mostly limited to ladders and scaffolds that can conquer only 70-90 m high buildings. The efficiency of fire-extinguishing facilities mounted on the outer side of the building turns out to be restricted by the height of such escape ladders used for fire-fighting and rescue operations. Access to outer walls and the roof during construction and maintenance are limited too. For instance, wooden platforms, hoisted on ropes and hung unreliably from the top, prevail in window washing. During construction there might be problems with scaffolding. During maintenance, the face of high buildings is not accessible for attending personnel, because no appropriate lifting systems are available.
It is known that during emergency situations, fire-fighters and rescue personnel use vehicles with telescopic booms, provided with special arrangements facilitating the escape of rescued people as shown in (RU No. 2079312, A 62 B 1/02, published 20 May 1997).
Functional capabilities of above-mentioned vehicles are limited by height: hence, they are useless for rescue and fire-fighting operations in buildings, higher than 70-90 meters, often called skyscrapers.
An exterior evacuation system is also known for use on high-rise buildings. It consists of rails secured to the outer walls, along which a cabin can travel transporting fire-fighters and rescue personnel to the emergency hotbed and evacuate rescued people from it. In this case, the rail with a traveling cabin has H-form in cross section and is toothed to be engaged with tooth-gear drive wheels (U.S. Pat. No. 4,865,155, B66 B9/00, publication 12 Sep. 1989, issued Sep. 12, 1989).
This system allows performing rescue and fire-fighting operation only in the zone of rail location, thus considerably diminishing its capabilities under conditions, when walls in the building have an arbitrary profile.